We'll Always Have Paris

It's been a few weeks since my last blog post... because I've spent most of those two weeks vacationing in France! It was a magical trip for me and my husband. To help me preserve the memories, I'll be sharing a detailed recap over the coming weeks (sprinkled in with other kinds of posts).

We had a direct flight to Paris on Air France, for which we showed up to DIA "probably too early." (We just don't like the stress that comes with cutting it close.) So for lunch, we discovered a speakeasy on Concourse A called Williams and Graham. (It seems these days they'll put a speakeasy anywhere. They know alcohol has been legal again for a while now, right?) Anyway, great pesto pasta and good drinks there, which helped going into the long flight.

Our arrival in Paris immediately kicked off an unfortunate recurring theme of the trip: there were going to be quite a few (fortunately minor) misfortunes; almost one every day. On this day, it was that the subway from the airport into the city was shut down for a power outage. So they were running busses to take people to the closest operating station to pick up the subway from there. Not nearly enough busses, though; it took a little over two hours just to get on one.

We did finally reach our hotel, and the Star Trek fan in me couldn't help but be tickled that it was on the opposite corner from a "Picard." (It's a nationwide store chain that sells frozen dinners, so... actually not that interesting.) Once checked in at last, we began a light afternoon and evening. We ate early dinner at a restaurant called Pradel. That started a much more pleasant recurring theme of the trip: the food was pretty good everywhere we went. The wine was even better; you could pretty much roll the dice on any French wine at any price point, and the results would "good" if not "great."

We wandered a bit before making our way to a cruise on the river Seine we'd planned ahead of time. This one was timed at sunset, which made for many lovely views (which have been the images throughout this post). However, they informed us at the outset that their sunset cruises are never "guided." I guess they figure that pointing out the different sights to you isn't quite romantic. Fortunately, the most famous locations speak for themselves. We passed Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, and of course the Eiffel Tower, among many others. We got to see the balloon-like Olympic Cauldron, which still lights up and floats in the evening sky.

Seine River cruises are a popular tourist activity, and we passed a lot of other boats full of people doing the same thing we were. And we couldn't help but notice, with a lot of kids doing the "6-7" hand-weighing gesture at us with amused giggles. Call it brain fog from the time change, but it took us several boats (no, not quite six or seven) to realize this was all being instigated by some guy near the front of our boat. 

Anyway, jet lag will not be denied. That was all the energy we could muster for the first day. So whether we'd sleep through the night or not, at least it would be in a hotel bed and not seated on an airplane. Next time... our first full day in Paris.